Empty seats at the Olympics show the reality of corporate Britain
I watched a bit of the Olympics yesterday. The road race cycling seemed to be well attended, even if many of us didn’t get the result we wanted to see.…
An Open Letter to the Salvation Army
Dear Salvation Army My name is Liz, I grew up in the Salvation Army - so did my dad and his dad, and my mum and her mum. I became…
For a new Scottish Enlightenment we must end Mummy, Daddy culture
By Gary Paterson Top Universities Need to Open Up to Access. St. Andrews University have recently hit out at data released by NUS Scotland which showed the university had the…
Gove is wrong, we should scrap exams at 16 altogether
The Conservative proposals to do away with GCSEs and re-introduce, in some form, a two tier O-Level / CSE-like system has understandably created controversy and distress among many critics and…
Democratising the economy, one university at a time
by Mike Williamson A few salvoes have been fired this week in the ideological battle for democratic and public higher education. Harriet Swain wrote an interesting exploratory article in the…
Bring back national service!
Having recently read Will Self’s light-hearted call for a return to the draft, I would like to suggest a modest proposal of my own for a new British levee en…
Students' union letting agencies – Part of the Solution?
After two long years, the project that has dominated most of my Vice Presidency of Queen's University Belfast Students' Union has come to fruition – the creation of 'SU Lets',…
Celebrating 44 Years of Legal Abortion
Today it is exactly 44 years since the 1967 Abortion Act came into effect. Since 27th April 1968, women in Scotland, England and Wales have had the right to decide…
How our universities were "liberated" & why New Labour’s structural reforms have failed
Having been expelled from all university committees as VPE for a protest against the university's controversial ban on protests, I have started a series of posts on the university based…
Deregulation of universities has led to an attack on students and the workforce.
An enormous discrepancy was revealed between the University of Birmingham’s “public narrative” on its finances and the private accounts actually used to run the university. Further it is setting up…